A few notes about how I've cataloged the following: Directors are labeled under their most commonly known name (example: Aristide Massaccesi will be filed under Joe D'Amato). Films are listed under their most commonly known titles with other common alternate titles in parenthesis (example: City of the Living Dead (aka The Gates of Hell)).

Friday, July 6, 2012

That quote is from Sydney Pollack, referenced in Roger Ebert’s obituary
for the director, and it’s an apt description of the director's style that he would more or less stick to throughout his career. We’re
a ways from the end-point in this retrospective, and I don’t want to get too
far ahead of myself; however, I couldn’t help but think of that quote as I
watched Jeremiah Johnson, a film that
so badly wants to be an epic western. The film is good, even great in certain moments, but it’s
a little too strained in its approach to be an epic (the movie is not even two
hours and it contains overture and an intermission complete with “entr’acte”
title card) in the same vein as other anti-establishment, Vietnam era westerns
like Little Big Man and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Each film is
different in tone, sure, but they all share something similar in that modern
society does not allow for man to peacefully enter into
nature and try and not only understand it but become one with it – to get away
from all of the violence and self-imposition; society is always seeping in to
corrupt and impose its own will. Those are the moments that are brilliantly
effective and play to Pollack’s strengths as a director. When Pollack isn’t meandering
from one scenic view to another (struggling to make the film visually poetic), Jeremiah Johnson is a beautiful,
introspective western akin to something felt while reading Thoreau (there’s
even a line where the character says, “the Rockies are the marrow of the world,” echoing the famous line from Walden). It is in those small, and often quiet, moments that Jeremiah Johnson works.

This idea of peacefully entering into communion with nature
is one we’ll get back to later, but for now a brief synopsis: Jeremiah Johnson is a simple western
about a jaded veteran of the Mexican-American War (Robert Redford in his second
collaboration with Pollack) seeks to leave civilization in hopes of finding something
better in the wilderness. And that’s really all of the setup we get (aside from
a hokey narration that leads into a song about Jeremiah over the opening
credits) as the film is essentially Jeremiah wandering around the beautiful
Utah locations. During that wandering, he pretty much does the following: learns
how to kill a bear, he adopts a mute son, saves a man’s life only to have it come
back and bite him in the ass, kills Native Americans, fights alongside Native
Americans, marries a Native American woman, and reluctantly leads a cavalry
unit over a secret Indian burial ground that results in the death of his
family.

It’s a great adventure film when you think about the
action scenes as if they were short films and not part of a much larger whole – and that’s really how the film plays: a compartmentalized adventure
story where certain scenes act as skits, almost, that are good enough
(sometimes even great) on their own, but they don’t quite coalesce into a fluid
whole. Pollack even admits that he had no idea what kind of film he was making
when they were shooting the film. He said that people would fall asleep looking
at the dailies because it was just a lot of the characters walking around in
the snow. Still, some of the wandering moments aren’t so bad, and it’s easy to
see why some of the naturalists and anti-establishment folks that were into,
say, Galway Kinnell, at the time responded so strongly to the film.

Some of those moments are when Jeremiah runs into the
eccentric Bear Claw (Will Geer), a bear hunter that has been out in the forest seemingly
forever. He and Jeremiah get into some wacky adventures that culminate in
Jeremiah cutting his teeth as a mountain man by killing his first bear (he has
to do so after the bear chases him into Bear Claw’s shack, complete with banjo
and fiddle music). It’s all very generic adventure/western stuff, but it’s
harmless enough. Other great scenes include when Jeremiah runs into Del Gue
(Stefan Gierasch), a man in Dutch with the Blackfoot Indian warriors who have buried
him in neck deep in the sand and have stuck feathers up his nose. It’s a humorous
scene. Johnson, along the way, Johnson befriends the Flathead Indians and is
given one of the tribal member’s sister to take with him and marry; the two
build a life with the mute boy he adopts (after coming across a family massacred
by the Blackfoot) and this makeshift family settles into a rhythm and a way of
life that is quickly interrupted by a U.S. Army Calvary search party. This
leads to the highlight of the film, a journey across a sacred Indian burial
ground as a reluctant Johnson – not wanting to tempt the fates – leads the
troops onto dangerous ground. As he returns home, he notices a makeshift grave
adorned with the jewelry of his wife and races home to find that his wife and
son have been murdered. At this point, Jeremiah
Johnson gets really quiet, and Pollack (and Redford) films the sorrowful
scene in a way that makes Johnson’s pain palpable; however, there’s also an elegiac,
almost ironic, note to it all that suggests: this is all part of being a
mountain man.

When it's not trying to be an adventure movie, the film’s tone – a mixture of exhilaration, contemplation,
and melancholy – is one of its biggest strengths, and it’s no surprise that
were it not for Pollack, the film would have been something completely
different in tone. I mentioned earlier that I wanted to get back to the film’s
central theme of man peacefully entering into communion with nature, and that
brings me to the script stage of the film and the man any pacifist would have a
problem working with: John Milius. Milius – a man’s man of Hollywood if there
ever was one – wrote the original screenplay, and if you are familiar even in
the slightest with the name John Milius, you know that perhaps no other
screenwriter is as overt in peppering his screenplays with his macho philosophies.
However, those philosophies did not mesh with the more liberal minded
Pollack.

Pollack didn’t seem to have much regard for the Milius script,
which according to Pollack lacked the kind of mythical tone he was looking for.
In this interview with John
Gallagher, Pollack explains the process of rewriting the script:

“The script was mythical as all Milius’ scripts are
mythical, but John Milius’ screenplay was primarily a piece of violence as almost
all Milius’ stuff is. The original Milius script was about a guy that went
around and ate trees; I mean, really, and ate livers and ripped Indians’ bodies
apart and ate livers and screamed and blood ran down his beard and so on. A lot
of the style and size of the piece comes from Milius, but the narrative after
the very beginning and the character Bear Claw, it’s pretty different,
radically, once Bob [Redford] and I began to work on it.”

In the same interview Pollack talks about how he and Milius
are actually friends, and that back when they were shooting Jeremiah Johnson, it was during a point
in Milius’ career where he really played up “to the hilt,” as Pollack says, his
macho persona. Pollack and Milius may have remained friends, but they were so
far apart politically at the time that couldn’t work together amicably on the
rewrite because they both wanted it to be something different.

Thankfully, Pollack’s ideas won out. Many call Jeremiah Johnson a “mythical” western,
but the film is more about the individual than about the style. I never once
felt like Jeremiah Johnson’s tone
worked in a visual sense; it was more of a mood that was felt in the smaller, quieter moments like the one
when Jeremiah looks upon his slain family, or the sound of the wind or a river
(sound is used brilliantly in the film). If the film is trying to be some kind
of epic, mythical western, it fails at achieving that tone. However, according to
Pollack, “mythical is not a word I even knew at the time; maybe I knew it, but I
certainly didn’t think it when I thought about Jeremiah Johnson. Somebody told me I made a mythical picture
afterwards, and I started wondering what precisely made it mythical.”

I have to agree with the filmmaker’s assessment: there just isn’t
much here that lends itself to the mythical. Jeremiah Johnson plays out like a series of scenes about a man
trying to ingratiate himself into the way of nature. I believe that a mythical
tone would have been apparent had Milius’ script been kept intact because it
would have inevitably been more about the heroic – and violent – journey of a
man making a new life for himself. The film, instead, is much sadder than that,
more individualistic (I love the way Pollack uses the on-location surroundings
from the various Utah state parks to dwarf his character). In that same
interview, Pollack, looking back on the film, sees it as being in-line with his
other films: “There is something in every film by any director by which you can
recognize that director, I think, and sometimes I think there’s a kind of
melancholy in mine. I don’t know why, but that’s what I see in them, and it’s
certainly there in Jeremiah Johnson.”

So Pollack opted for the melancholy over the visceral. Pollack
claims that Milius was pleased with the final version of the film because, as
Pollack says, “[Milius] is a romantic at heart.” Pollack wanted to look at the
film through an introspective lens whereas Milius wanted the film to be more
overtly macho and violent. And from this came a film that Pollack called as “vivid
and moody,” and one of the most “poetic,” films he ever made because it was one
of his most visual. A picture made out of “rhythms and moods” and Pollack
explains. And there certainly are some nice moments in the film where the director
of photography, Duke Callaghan, simply fills his frame with the natural beauty
that surrounded them on-location. It’s not a singularly memorable film,
visually, but there are some nice postcard-type shots that are pleasant to gaze
upon, but they certainly don’t lend themselves to the kind of anticipation that
holds your interest waiting for that next great “thing” that’s going to fill
the frame. For a film that does a lot of wandering, the lack of a visual punch
really makes the film feel like a drag at times.

So where does Jeremiah
Johnson fall in the pantheon of westerns? Unlike the artier McCabe and Mrs. Miller that came out a
year prior and unlike the darker, more existential Spaghetti westerns of Leone
or Eastwood, Jeremiah Johnson definitely
feels like a western that is more classical in its approach to the subgenre.
And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but there are times when the
film meanders too much for my liking, making it more akin to Dances with Wolves than McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

That may be an unfair criticism considering the quotes from
Pollack I peppered this piece with, but I wanted more from Jeremiah Johnson even though the film, really, aspired to be
nothing more than a simple story about a man in the wilderness and the characters
he encounters. Still, there’s no denying the passion that went in to making the
film: Pollack mortgaged his home in order to finish the film (which went way
over budget due to the location shooting in Utah’s Zion National Park), Redford
poured his heart into a performance that he truly believed in (the project was
a passion for him as he helped Pollack re-tool the script; Redford was also
looking for a box-office winner after some clunkers post-Butch Cassidyand the Sundance Kid – Jeremiah Johnson
really resonated with audiences, and he was a big reason why), the
photography – even if it is a tad banal – is filmed with the eye of someone
that appreciates the beauty of the Rockies, natural sound is used extremely
well, and there’s a real sense of understanding in terms of tone.

Sometimes the film is introspective and melancholy, and sometimes
it’s wacky (the bear scene) and a great adventure; however, it never really
coalesces into the epic western that I think it’s trying to be. It’s as if the
spirit and tone of the film didn’t match its visual and thematic aspirations. I
see a film in Jeremiah Johnson that
is the precursor – the feeling out process – to the kind of prestige films
Pollack became a master at compiling (Out
of Africa, to put a title to this thought). I’ve mentioned a few times the
difference in looking at Pollack’s films versus the other two directors I’ve
covered. And maybe that somewhat plays into my blasé feelings towards the
aesthetics of this film. Pollack made the kind of movies that owe something to classic
Hollywood; in that vein, he made what some would today call “prestige”
pictures. Ken Russell was definitely not Hollywood (he only lasted through two films
in America), Oliver Stone was a kind of polished, Hollywood version of the art
house experimental film, and Pollack seems to be the furthest from them in that
he very clearly and proudly (and genuinely) made Hollywood prestige pictures.

But damn, despite there not being a ton of impressive stuff to look at, there’s a hell of a lot of
stuff you sense and feel in a Pollack film. More than anything you see the work
of a man who was one of the very best at getting brilliant performances from
major Hollywood stars. Pollack was a filmmaker during an era where big stars
like Redford and Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty were becoming more and more artistically
inclined; actors in the ‘70s, unlike any era before it, were imposing their artistic
will on a film. Actors weren’t contractually obligated to work for a particular
studio like they were during the old Hollywood studio days, so if a producer didn’t
give in to an actor’s demands, they could just move on to a different project
being produced by a different studio (Beatty seemed to think that he could
always direct a film better than the directors hired to make movies he was
starring in). That is unless they had a director that could rein them in and
really harness that artistic ability for the betterment of the film. Pollack
had an incredible skill at doing just that. So, as you’re likely bound to hear
throughout this retrospective, just because Pollack may not have the élan of some of his contemporaries (and
really, because it never ceases to amaze me, just stop and think about all of
the innovative filmmakers in America and abroad whose work during that era was
flooding theaters), he possessed an entirely different, and just as impressive,
skill: he continually got the best out of his big-time movie stars.

So as we move forward with this retrospective it will be
interesting to notice the mastery of tone and the ability to get the best out
of his actors. In Jeremiah Johnson,
it was the ability to find the melancholy in an original screenplay filled with
visceral violence; it was also the ability to take a big star – and a good
looking one at that – in Redford and convincingly turn him into a man that
wants to say the hell with “civilized” society and become a naturalist. I highly
doubt Redford was what Milius had in mind for his version of the character, but
for Pollack’s melancholy version, Redford is perfectly cast. And I think a lot
of that has to do with Pollack’s ability to get the absolute best and most
interesting elements out of that performance. Jeremiah Johnson was a big hit for both Pollack and Redford, and the
two would collaborate again just one year later on the hit romantic drama, The Way We Were – a further example of
Pollack’s complete mastery of eliciting great performances from his actors despite the film they're in not living up to the level of the performances.

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